One of the designers who made it happen

Joel was great! He was amenable to suggestions, prompt in revisions, and produced a creative and original logo that stood out from the pack!

- Rick-GreenLogic

How infoniche started their print or packaging design journey

Summary

Need a striking and eye-catching design (front and back) for a DVD about our Solar System.

The video is full of breathtaking photographs from NASA spacecraft, and the cover should reflect the content.

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

This DVD is the first in a series. Therefore, there should be one or more elements that can be repeated on subsequent volumes to establish continuity. This could be the font style and first part of the title, or it could be something more than that. It’s up to you.

The video itself has a lot of photographs of our Solar System’s planets and moons. It uses Adobe’s Trajan Pro typeface for internal titling and captions. You don’t have to use Trajan necessarily -- this is just to point out that for the cover, a font that’s excessively modern probably won’t work.

The title of the video is “What You Aren’t Being Told About Astronomy, Volume I: Our Created Solar System”.

Note: one of the files provided (Columbia_Moon.jpg) should not be
included as-is on the front cover. It would be too similar to the cover of
another DVD already on the market. If you can find a different use for
it (or pieces of it), that would be OK.

If you find other images you want to use, please make sure they are public domain, and that we can verify this. We’re willing to buy stock
photography or images if they're necessary (and inexpensive), but since
most NASA images are public domain, hopefully this won't be
needed.

If you have a specific idea that would require an image you can't find, post a request and we'll try to find it for you. We know the NASA image databases pretty well. Please do your best to describe exactly what you're looking for. (Example: I want a photo of the Moon, looking across dramatic terrain, and taken from a low altitude above the Moon's surface looking out toward space, with the horizon at a 45 degree angle going up from left to right.) Or, if you want a higher-resolution version of an image you've already found, point us to the URL of the lower-res version. However, either way there's obviously no guarantee that we'll be able to find what you want.

The dimensions for the final design are 3236 pixels wide by 2173 high. This includes a spine in the middle (165 pixels wide). The cover will be printed at 300 dpi. (For interim mockups, lower resolutions are fine, of course.)

We might ask for minor revisions after the contest ends. (In particular, a physicist is currently reviewing this video, and his comments will be inserted into the back cover copy if they’re brief and received in time.)

Final delivery will be as a PNG, along with the layered project file. If you can supply an Adobe InDesign INDD file (version 2.0 and above), that would be ideal. Otherwise, a PSD will work too.

If you wish to submit a front cover design first for feedback before spending time on a matching spine and back, that would be fine. We're happy to give guidance on the front cover first, as long as enough time remains for a proper treatment of the back and spine too.

Wants

- Clean and elegant design. It should communicate the beauty, awe, and grandeur of the planets in our Solar System.

Don't want

- A too-futuristic or science fiction look.
- Artwork about far-away planets orbiting other stars.
- Too large of an emphasis on galaxies, nebulae, or stars. Using them as background is OK (if it's done subtly). But the focal point of the design should have something to do with planets, moons, and/or our Sun.